
Winter skies aflame
Fiery orange fading fast
Night falls cold and grey
Or not, depending on my mood
Winter skies aflame
Fiery orange fading fast
Night falls cold and grey
We were walking across the Greig Street foot-bridge the other day, where my husband stopped half way along to capture a softly snow-capped Ben Wyvis with only one narrow ribbon of afternoon sunshine lifting the view.
Ben Wyvis is about 35 miles north of Inverness so is not always visible from the city – I really love the way everything looks dull blue-grey in this image apart from the highlighted mountain range itself 🙂
Winter weather makes some people glum
Wrapped up warmly but still they succumb
To the cold, feet like stone
Fingers chilled to the bone
All extremities left feeling numb
For this weekend’s Weekly Prompt, Sue and GC were asking – what is the colour of a winter’s day? My ideal answer would be blue and white, crisp crunchy frost or soft fluffy snow sparkling against a clear blue sky.
But here in Inverness lately we have been inundated with cold rain and biting winds, so my winter days so far this year have been mainly made up of dark greys and muddy browns. My garden has already been cleared down for the winter but I took my camera outside this morning to see what colours I could find to brighten the day…
And I found I still have purple and yellow chrysanthemums flowering, as well as the red and white flowers of the Hot Lips salvia. The holly is looking a beautifully shiny deep green, and my azalea buds finally losing the last of their autumnal finery are beginning to prepare for next year’s flowers.
So perhaps even in the dullest of grey days I need to remind myself it is always possible to find a bit of colour to brighten your world, as long as you take the time to look for it 🙂
Walking along the Caledonian Canal passing by Muirtown Basin this afternoon, I couldn’t help but notice the frozen skin of ice on the surface of the water creating a little skating pond for the birds. Nowhere near frozen enough to support people of course, but frozen over nonetheless 🙂
Who Won the Week for me this week has to be the amazing cold weather. This weekend the UK has been blasted by Storm Darcy coming over from continental Europe, and although here in Inverness we don’t actually have any snow lying at the moment, this was the frozen shoreline this afternoon, walking along the rocks and seaweed at low tide. Although the salt in the seawater usually means it doesn’t ever freeze this close to the shore, today to my surprise everything below the high water mark was covered with a thin crumbly layer of ice, which looked really weird!
PS The last image shows part of the rotting wooden timbers of an old shipwreck only ever visible at low tide 🙂
I know I’ve posted several very similar images of the red pelargonium sitting in my cold, unheated conservatory all winter.
It’s truly been a beautiful bright splash of colour standing proud against the otherwise dull grey monochrome world outside – or against a lighter snowy backdrop, like today – and look, still it continues to flower 🙂
On top of the stark snow-sprinkled die-back and deterioration of last year’s garden comes the arrival of tiny snowdrops, the first flowering new growth of the year 🙂
Our first snowdrops of the year are breaking through the frosty ground in our back garden. It might not look pretty but I’ve found if I keep the autumn leaf-fall on this flower bed (under the tree) intact as a kind of mulch it works surprisingly well as a protective cover over the winter months 🙂
We had another light snowfall yesterday, and although last night’s frost means today everything is still crunchy underfoot it already seems to be melting a little in the low winter mid-day sun. So my camera and I went out to the back garden to see what we could see, taking a series of photographs of my snowmelt winter garden 🙂